Description

The xylophone (from the Greek words xylon, "wood" + phōnē, "sound, voice", meaning "wooden sound") is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars struck by mallets. Each bar is an idiophone tuned to a pitch of a musical scale, whether pentatonic or heptatonic in the case of many African and Asian instruments, diatonic in many western children's instruments, or chromatic for orchestral use.

The term xylophone may be used generally, to include all such instruments, such as the marimba, balafon and even the semantron. However, in the orchestra, the term xylophone refers specifically to a chromatic instrument of somewhat higher pitch range and drier timbre than the marimba, and these two instruments should not be confused.

The term is also popularly used to refer to similar instruments of the lithophone and metallophone types. For example, the Pixiphone and many similar toys described by the makers as xylophones have bars of metal rather than of wood, and so are in organology regarded as a glockenspiels rather than as xylophones. This misnomer was also popularised by the Sooty show, in which the metal-barred instrument he plays is always described as a xylophone.